


Spellbound

by crossingwinter



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She gets it from her father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spellbound

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

-“Unending Love”, Rabindranath Tagore

* * *

She gets it from her father.

She realized that when she first saw him, all those years before, growing up together in Leadworth.  He would die for her mother, she could see that, and she knew that one day, she’d find it too—find _him_ too (because she could only ever feel that way about _him_.) She supposed she would have to kill him at some point.  She didn’t really have a choice in that—the desire to kill him, shoot him, kiss him through with poison, ran just as strong as the desire to see his face, to run her fingers over his hands, to hold him surrounded by stars and planets and galaxies.

She was glad that she had killed him, she supposed, because it meant she got to give him life again.  She got to give up her future in one grand, romantic gesture—the kind of which she had always been dying to see her dad do for her mum.  She gave up her futures, and her futures’ future, for him, that he would keep living, and breathing, and running through space and time.

Sometimes she marveled at him—that he could look at a girl, the psychopathic daughter of his friends, abducted and raised to kill him, and treat her with kindness.  It was, after all, the kindness that had slain Mels, that had birthed River, kindness that Rory and Amy believed so completely that they would stand between their daughter and their friend to save him from her.  His kindness propelled them, and captivated her, hypnotized her, invaded her more than Kovarian could ever have managed if left alone.

She blamed her psychopathy, in truth.  Blamed it for her tendency to violence where he refused, blamed it for her contentedness to sit away in a locked cell for years on end for the nights when he would come and whisk her away, or when she would—out of boredom, mostly—whisk herself away and call him to her.  Dancing in Paris, hiking the glass slopes of Altior Minor, walking hundreds of times around the tiniest planet following the sunset.  He gave her moments of history, snippets of time that she could carry with her on the lonely days when the only joy left to her was terrorizing the guards at Stormcage.  He gave her his love, and that was all she wanted, all she lived for, because life without him would be life more dreadfully monotonous than the days she spent imprisoned.

She knew he had loved before her.

She knew that he was a father, a grandfather, a widower.  She knew that some mortal shade of him lived in another dimension, happily married to Rose Tyler—a woman he would have died for once in more than one of his incarnations.  She knew that there had been some dabbling with Jack Harkness (even _she_ had dabbled with Jack Harkness—before he had taken hold of her being so completely, of course.  And besides, who _hasn’t_ dabbled with Jack Harkness?).  But none of that mattered, not even in the slightest, because she felt his heart race when he touched her, saw his eyes light up when she appeared before him.

Those eyes, so old, so alone, alight for her.  Because only she was the remedy for his loneliness, she was the one who understood his being because she, alone of all those he travelled with—Rose and Jack and Micky and Martha and Donna and Doctordonna and Sarah Jane and countless others including her own parents—knew what it felt like for every fiber of your being to explode in timelight and reform into something so different, so not-you and yet so you that you wondered how you could have existed any other way before.  He had forgotten what it was to be understood on that base level until she had exploded in front of him in Hitler’s office.  He had walked so alone for so long that even when he was with his companions, his friends, he didn’t know how to be a part of them.  Except with her.

Sometimes, he was so childlike—leaping through waterfalls on Mars 9; sliding across the TARDIS floor on his back, humming a tarentella; the look of utter shock when she pulled him into a _real_ police booth and had her wicked way with him.  Other times, he was so very old that she—and she had lived more than one life already—felt unbelievably young.  Those times, he would take her hand, and hold her until the age was gone from his eyes, and only that boyish smile remained, as if she and her steadying heart were some fountain of youth.

She knows he’s seen her die, knows he knows how she will end, and it kills her, because the idea of him persisting on without her, soldiering on (the oncoming storm) until something new came along is wrong.  And God, she hoped not somebody new—or did she? Would somebody new make it, make him, better?  He would never forget her—he never forgot anyone—and he would, could, never replace her. 

And though there was a part of her that was ashamed of admitting it, she did not know if she could live without him.  She knew that there was something wrong with a woman living for a man, and nothing else—but what about a woman living for the very definition of her life?  She had lived for him from the moment she’d been conceived, and could she die without him? Could she die for him?

The answer was a simple yes.  She had given up her futures for him, had given up her freedoms for him, had given up her family for him, and would give up her life for him.


End file.
